The happenings of Evelyn and Jessica, their superhero Mom Cynthia, and Dad too...

Monday, June 22, 2009

Up and down we go...

Evelyn was doing great today. She was breathing room air for most of the day, and I was able to hold her again for about and hour and a half this afternoon. She started getting her feeds again, so she will slowly start building herself back up.

Jessica had a little harder day. Her regular labs overnight showed that her hematocrit and sodium were low. The hematocrit is the measure of the percentage of red blood cells in the blood. It's normal for premies hematocrit to be low with all the tests that are run on them with their low blood volume. The remedy is for her to get a unit of blood, which she did this afternoon. Her sodium levels are low because of the diuretics she had been recieving to try to get the fluid off of her lungs. That can be replaced with saline fluids.

Niether of these are major problems, except that Jessica had had her IVs and PICC lines removed last week. Blood and saline can't be given in the same IV, so she had to have two new IVs put in either arm today. Since their arms are so tiny, the nurses tape support boards to their wrists so that they cannot pull the IVs out as easy. That means that both of Jessica's wrists have the supports on them. She was not real happy this afternoon when she couldn't rub her fact like she likes to do.

The blood and saline helped her out though, so that is good. In fact, while I was holding Evelyn, Jessica completely turned her body about 90 degrees as if to see what we were doing. I think she may have been a bit jealous. :)